You’ll always start each round placed in the middle of the arena with your sword raised, your foe in front of you, and a beautiful chandelier swinging above your head, and the round will always end with both of you dead. The simple platforms and jumps are devilishly difficult when under pressure, and a single slip up can turn the tide in your disfavor – nothing is certain in Nidhogg.īut all of this excitable gameplay is cushioned around two predictable elements that strengthen the core experience.
Your trusty sword is either kept on your person, or tossed in reckless abandon to catch your opponent off guard. Both players either die and respawn countless times, or a handful of times. It’s a frantic, unpredictable, emotionally engaging race between two players to reach a finish line. It’s in this creative state of mind that Nidhogg, a two-player only 2D fighter cum platformer released in 2011 and seemingly exclusive to video game expos, was born. You didn’t play to see the ending, you played to simply… play. The predictable prologue and epilogue placed a greater importance on the journey through Banjo-Kazooie rather than the outcome. The familiar starting point of an ancient villain disrupting the hero’s normal way of life, an epic quest spanning across countless lands, and the final triumph over evil at the end of it all was an effective power fantasy that worked because everything was so familiar. I was enamoured with the young man (or bear) rescuing his fair maiden (or sister) from an evil witch (that part stayed the same) because I recognised the interactive manifestation of the fantasy genre I found so compelling in books. As the cliche goes, it was more than just a video game to me. I came into the gaming landscape at an age where my heightened sense of imagination was paired with a looser understanding of reality, and Rareware were the bees knees of mascot platformers with Banjo-Kazooie. If you were to trace my interest in video game endings over time, the graph would resemble a cascading wave of disinterest.
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